Low water activity and smooth-textured fillings, such as crème-type fillings, for sandwich cookies (e.g., OREO® cookies) generally are produced using large-scale manufacturing equipment on production lines. Typically near the end of the manufacturing line, a slurry containing oil and sugar goes through a scraped-surface heat exchanger before being dispensed onto cookie base cakes and passed through a cooling tunnel to increase the firmness of the filling.
Fillings coming directly out of the scraped-surface heat exchanger are often too soft for use in a rotary sandwiching machine. The art has proposed a number of solutions to this challenge. However, the proposed solutions generally result in slowing production and/or increasing production costs.
For instance, additional sugar can be added to increase the crystallinity and thereby providing a firmer texture to the filling before it is dispensed onto cookie base cakes. Such addition of sugar generally is undesirable as doing so may increase production time as well as increasing costs for ingredients.
Another attempt to resolve this problem is to pass the fillings through a cooling tunnel for several minutes (e.g., 4-5 minutes) at 35 to 40° F. after dispensing the fillings onto cookie base cakes. The cooling tunnel increases the rate of crystallization, thereby providing a firmer texture to the filling. The cooled and firmer filling is better suited for handling and/or processing (e.g., by a rotary sandwiching machine). However, inclusion of cooling tunnels in the production line adds increased production time, energy usage, and overall manufacturing costs.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to be able to eliminate the use of the cooling tunnel from the manufacturing line and to avoid the need to add additional sugar during a production run to adjust the firmness of a filling.